25. Results of Charles's Execution. 1649.—With the king's execution all that could be permanently effected by his opponents had been accomplished. When the Long Parliament met, in November 1640, all Englishmen had combined to bring Charles to submit to Parliamentary control. After the summer of 1641 a considerable part of the nation, coming to the conclusion that Charles was ready to use force rather than to submit, took arms against him to compel him to give way. Towards the end of 1647 a minority of Englishmen, including the army, came to the conclusion that it was necessary to deprive Charles of all real power, if the country was not to be exposed to constantly recurring danger whenever he saw fit to re-assert his claims to the authority which he had lost. In 1648 a yet smaller minority came to the conclusion that security could only be obtained if he were deprived of life. In depriving the king of life all had been done which force could do. The army could guard a scaffold, but it could not reconstruct society. The vast majority of that part of the nation which cared about politics at all disliked being ruled by an army even more than it had formerly disliked being ruled by Charles, and refused its support to the new institutions which, under the patronage of the army, were being erected in the name of the people.

CHAPTER XXXVI
THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 1649-1660

LEADING DATES

1. Establishment of the Commonwealth. 1649.—It was not to be expected that the men in Parliament or in the army by whom great hopes of improvement were entertained should discover that they had done all that it was possible for them to do. They believed it to be still in their power to regenerate England. The House of Commons declared England to be a Commonwealth, 'without a king or House of Lords,' and, taking the name of Parliament for itself, appointed forty-one persons to be a Council of State, charged with the executive government, and renewed annually. Most members of the Council of State were also members of Parliament; and, as the attendance in Parliament seldom exceeded fifty, the Councillors of State (if they agreed together) were able to command a majority in Parliament, and thus to control its decisions. Such an arrangement was a mere burlesque on Parliamentary institutions, and could hardly have existed for a week if it had not been supported by the ever-victorious army. In the army, indeed, it had its opponents, who, under the name of Levellers, called out for a more truly democratic government; but they had no man of influence to lead them. Cromwell had too much common sense not to perceive the difficulty of establishing a democracy in a country in which that form of government had but few admirers, and he suppressed the Levellers with a strong hand. In quiet times, Cromwell would doubtless have made some attempt to place the constitution of the Commonwealth on a more satisfactory basis, but for the present it needed to be defended rather than improved.

2. Parties in Ireland. 1647-1649.—In Ireland the conjunction formed at the end of 1641 between the Catholic lords and the native Irish broke down in 1647. Rinuccini, the Papal Nuncio (see p. [550]), discovered that Ireland could only be organised to resist English Puritanism under the authority of the Papal clergy, as there was not sufficient union amongst the Irish themselves to admit the existence of lay national institutions. He was unable to carry his idea into effect. Ormond, the king's Lord-lieutenant, who was himself a Protestant, left Ireland, and handed over Dublin to the Parliamentary troops under Michael Jones, rather than see it in the hands of Rinuccini and the Celts. Even the Catholic lords objected to become the servants of a clerical State, and Rinuccini, baffled on every side, was obliged to return to Italy. In September, 1648, Ormond returned to Ireland, where he soon afterwards entered into a close alliance with the Catholic lords, who were to receive religious toleration, and in return to defend the king. After the king's execution, Charles II. was proclaimed in Ireland. Ormond, having now an army in which Irish Catholics and English Royalist Protestants were combined, hoped to be able to overthrow the Commonwealth both in Ireland and in England.